Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (29 page)

But he did not make the gesture. He merely gave a foolish flattering smile and felt silliness daubed all over his face like a congealed cosmetic mask. And hung his head in shame over the table as if lost in thought, thus to convey himself to Kurt as the picture of indifferent equanimity in the face of destiny. He wanted Kurt to take his behavior for the lofty indifference of a man who simply keeps out of such matters and understands nothing of the whole business.

“After all, who knows, Herr Professor?” said Kurt with a helpless sigh. His mother called him from the kitchen. He was presently back with the food and a glass of foaming beer. Melkior fell to greedily, his stomach thanking him with a low murmur, enjoying itself. Kurt, too, was enjoying himself seeing how well the distinguished guest liked their cooking. A Wiener schnitzel on a meat-free day. It’s-a-dream, it’s-a-dream, it’s-a-dream. Melkior began to dance a Viennese waltz inside: tra-a-lala, tra-a-lala. “By the way, I’ve asked Father—it’s plain old acetic acid,” whispered Kurt all of a sudden, leaning over close to Melkior’s ear. “You soak a cigarette in it and allow it to dry. And you smoke it, as fast as you can, right before the physical. It’ll have your heart pounding like mad, there’s not a specialist in the world who can see through this one. … And there are no harmful aftereffects, everything’s back to normal in twenty minutes. People used it to get out of combat duty in the Great War. Father was an
Einjährig-Freiwilliger
, nobody liked the idea of getting killed … for an Austro-Hungarian emperor. The Hapsburgs were a disaster for Germanic thought. It’s a good thing the devil took them. The waltz-politics of Vienna ‘On the Beautiful Blue Danube’ are finished once and for all. It’s only today that the Austrian Province has found its true place, within community of the Third Reich. Don’t you agree, Herr Professor?”

Melkior muttered something through a mouthful. His body was getting drunk on food, receiving Kurt only on some auxiliary wavelength of consciousness and registering him as a tasty addition to the music of smell and taste and chewing and swallowing. The Wiener schnitzel, Strauss in the mouth. He chewed in three-quarter time and smiled imperially.

“I’m glad you like our food, Herr Professor.”

Oh yes, oh yes, I like your sister, too, and your mother as well, and all their chops and steaks and stuffed cabbage and escalloped veal. … He felt the cannibal theme approaching and thrust it away in fear. There goes Kurt again, inspiring the meaty cannibal blowout. Oh courteous Kurt!

I left them vomiting nearby in the jungle. The agent is in a very bad way. He lies on his back and howls in pain. His friends are pushing their fingers down his throat, sitting on his stomach, choking him, strangling him, the better to make him spew it all out. They would have preferred to strangle him to death! He has drawn the keepers’ attention. One of them has already gone back to the village to report the incident. “They’ll kill him,” says the doctor in confidence to the first mate.

“Who will? Our …”—“… hosts. That’s what all farmers do to sick cattle.”—“Why don’t you help him?”—“Impossible. It’s stress-induced colic. If grazing cattle were suddenly to begin thinking, the same thing would happen. Perhaps he should be told openly that his spasms are taking him straight to the cauldron.”—“Well, tell him, then.”—“You tell him. He won’t believe me. Apart from that, you can break it to him more gently.” The first mate measures him contemptuously head to toe. He approaches the group clustered around the agent and stops the entire revive-the-drowned-man exercise with a single gesture. He leans over the patient and says to him solemnly, “Sir, they do not eat the sick, they burn them alive immediately, to prevent contagion. You must therefore be healthy if you mean to survive … at least for a time.” This does the trick. The agent looks at him, composed, his face pain-free, and stands up right away. He even gives him a polite smile, as a sign of a confused gratitude. “And now when they come to take a look at you, eat as heartily as you can, it is your only hope.” But now everyone else throws themselves at the
only way out:
they fall furiously to devouring the fruits (like men just saved from drowning …) and the doctor mutters to himself: ptui, the anthropoid apes! and spits in disgust.

“It can’t be!” ejaculated a horrified Kurt. “Not a hair, is it?” It was as if he had been present at the feeding of an underage crown prince.

“A hair? What hair?” said Melkior, surprised.

“In your food?” Kurt was apprehensive. “That’s impossible.”

“Whatever made you think … Why a hair?”

“Well, you sort of … expectorated a bit,” explained Kurt, with tactful hesitation.

“Oh, that?” laughed Melkior. “I spat at something I was thinking about.”

Kurt was relieved. “Another beer, Herr Professor? On the house.” That was to celebrate the absence of the hair. “No, thank you, Kurt. I’ve got to go.”

Kurt is totting up the bill “one Wiener schnitzel, one salad …” and the little old man in white is talking, “… and then, my friend, he took after him over the rooftopsh. And you know how shteep London roofsh are. … Anyway, there they are: the detective chayshing, the robber running. Jumping like a cat. Getting hold of chimney potsh and lightning rodzh and such. But the cop shtumbled and fell—right acrosh a torn pieshe of tin sheeting, the poor man—and got hish throat shlashed, my friend! Hizh jugular! He shtarted bleeding shomething awful, shtreaming down the roof and into the drainpipe. Raining blood. And the robber—believe it or not,
bud—
the robber ran back to hish purshuer and, let’sh fayshe it, enemy, tore a shtrip off hizh own shirt without a moment’sh hezhitation, and shtopped the bleeding. The cop would’ve bled to death on that rooftop if the robber hadn’t had hizh heart in the right playshe.”

Melkior took a long time adjusting his tie, retying the lace on his left shoe, on his right shoe, softening, squeezing, twirling a cigarette between his fingers …

“So what happened next? … the coppersh caught the robber.” So?

“Sho dat’sh my point,
bud
—dere’zh shome goodnesh in everyone. Even in the worsht kind of robber, az dish cayshe showzh. I forgot to shay de man waz a notorioush murderer. And dey shay, Doshtoyevshky!”

Melkior left disappointed, to Kurt’s bowing and scraping goodbyes.

Dostoyevsky? Everyone goes to Fyodor Mikhaylovich with their little monsters. Try Dickens, the company for quiet compassion. Don’t proclaim every little bastard who can think of an ever so slightly twisted plot to be an Ivan Karamazov, or every lovable idiot, a Prince Mishkin. It’s no use our referring to literature—it will provide no excuses here.

He felt satiety like the release after the enjoyment of sin. Now he repented. Once Appetite, satisfied, had dropped off to sleep, Conscience came on with her retinue of Principles. Where had she been when the Great Carnivore was stirring and howling in his empty madhouse? She herself had served at his court as a jester at the well-laden table, regaling him with stories—during the Wiener schnitzel—of the castaways (whom you, following the requirements of your plot, had induced to vomit) eating copiously and discovering a new faith for their existence: “therefore you must be healthy if you want to survive—for a time, at least. Eat as heartily as you can, it is your only hope.” Oh, you’re too sly by half, Madam! I wouldn’t put it past you to search for the more titillating passages in
The Decameron
or drool over pornographic pictures.
Cinémacochon
for the Jesuits. And then it’s, My son, you are forgiven for your sins … in your soul. On the body, however, the bellies remain. Sins and bellies—noumena and phenomena,
et substratus est appetitus gloriosus
, sang out Melkior like the Credo at High Mass
et incarnatus est …
and his belly strutted ahead of him, happily burbling its little song:

I’ll be asking you before long, perhaps as early as tomorrow, about keeping fit, dear Sancho. It may be a question of days, says Kurt. And tomorrow is one of those days it’s “a question of.” Incidentally, what if it really does all start tomorrow? What’s tomorrow, anyway? (If a fool were to hear me he would say Thursday.)
Tomorrow
is the temporal border between two states of wakefulness, two states of awareness of being. Clocks do not determine
tomorrow. Tomorrow
is defined only by a visit to Enka, a longed-for encounter with Viviana, a night at the Give’nTake, an uncertain, anxious night in expectation of the day after tomorrow’s
tomorrow.
The evening smiles winningly, promising me a lovely day—tomorrow. The meteorological tomorrow: continued clear and warm. (Winter delaying its arrival, most kindly bestowing on us this last autumn.) The pedagogical tomorrow: think about tomorrow, my child. The political tomorrow: Stalin giving Hitler a wink—
khorosho!—and
Hitler winking back—
natürlich.
The historical tomorrow: and when men discovered the divine power of matter, it came to reign over them, confusing their minds, blighting their lives and then swallowing itself and turning into a Force which destroyed all laws and there is now not a single consciousness left that could proclaim it stupid in the name of Hegel. The esthetical tomorrow: when man discovered the ugliness of matter, artists became tradesmen of the ugly. The geographical tomorrow: and the vast peninsula you see here was given the name of Europe. Here lived a biped who composed certain works they called
tragedies
, and whose name was Shakespeare. The original spelling is lost, the name having survived only in a script we now call the Russian alphabet. The philosophical tomorrow: there will be no tomorrow. The Force will drink all of time and swallow all of space and sink into eternal sleep from satiety and boredom. An eternity later, it will stretch, give a hungover yawn like a drunkard after a mad binge in the course of which it smashes everything within reach, and ask: Where are the objects, where are the humans? And will feel the crushing solitude and the emptiness all around it. And it will wretch with despair. And out of the vomit there will come into being a New World and in it sentient worms will hatch which will slither in the mud and revel in its beauty. And they will believe themselves to have been created by the Great Worm in His own image and Himself to cover the entire world with His length, which is so infinite as to be beyond their comprehension. Because they are small worms of finite length, though each believes itself to be longer than any other. And from this will spring their belief in the inequality among them. And a minority will manage to persuade the majority that they, the minority, are actually longer than the rest, hence better able to intuit the length of the Great Worm Himself. And they will become exegeticists and prophets among, and eventually rulers of, their equilongitudinal brother worms. And they will bore for themselves sumptuous worm holes on mud heights where the view of mudscapes is better and danger of flood much less and the population density is lower. And they will regard the valley worms with contempt. They will then quarrel over the ownership of the heights. Each will want to acquire the other’s heights for himself—the other heights will seem to each of them to be more attractive and more comfortable—and the heights worms will go saying to the small valley worms: those others have betrayed the Great Worm! They preach that he has no body at all, being of Infinite Length. Or Pure Span. Now, meddling with any of the attributes of His being—and bodily existence is the most essential of them all—would be the first step to disbelief and practically an act of treason. We therefore urge the worms faithful to the Great Worm to fight the infidel unto the death. And so a dreadful war breaks out among the worms, to go on for another eternity. And after that other eternity is done, after the worms have devoured one another in their graves …

And so Melkior the worm entered the worm hole called the Give’nTake. But inside he did not find Ugo the worm nor did he find Viviana the she-worm. The absence smote Melkior sorely to his very core and he bent painfully with the ache. So they were together, tied up in a fornicating knot, those accursed worms! He slithered over to the table at which sat bloated worm Maestro and pale worm Chicory, at the very moment when repugnant caterpillar Thénardier was setting down before them two shots, shot to shot.

“Bring a third, you spotted salamander, for our pain-wrenched Eustachius.” Thus did Maestro, the bloated worm, welcome the arrival of Melkior the worm. Chicory the worm Hasdrubalson laughed a spasmodic laugh, energetically flicking his fair hair across his handsomely elongated brow.

They had been having a Low Mass colloquy at the altar of St. Giventake’s. They stopped their sweet conversation short at the approach of Melkior, the wormy worm, thereby arousing his suspicion at the sudden silence greeting his arrival. He therefore chose not to take a seat but strove to justify his approach to their table by inquiring:

“Look, have you seen Ugo the Wo—” he sliced the worm in two in the nick of time.

“No, we haven’t, Wo,” said Chicory in jest, his face nervous, and Wo offered him a chair, saying
Wo
in a worm-eaten tone, being dilapidated.

“Have a seat, kind Eustachius,” and Maestro began pushing the chair under Melkior. Using the edge of the seat he bent Melkior’s knees so that Melkior sat down automatically. “He’ll be along soon enough, to report back. It’s the feat that matters … though it’s not as difficult as he imagines. Be that as it may, don’t fret, Eustachius, he’ll be lying anyway. Ugo’s a born … no, better said: an invent-as-U-go liar.”

Melkior saw red. It’s all so public, so embarrassing. And she’s a shameless …

“Don’t go pale and wan, Eustachius. Ugo’s an ugotistical little twit. Quite unlike you. You aspire toward … I mean to say, you have noble aspirations. That business between the two of them can’t last long. She’s after something permanent, matrimonial, and Ugo’s no more than an ugreeable evening.”

“Why are you trying to draw me into this?” said Melkior in protest and made to get up.